Galleria Doria Pamphilj

The Galleria Doria Pamphilj is one of the few princely art collections in Rome still owned and lived in by the founding family, in their ancestral palace on Via del Corso. The collection dates from the 1651 marriage uniting the Doria and Pamphilj houses and includes works by Caravaggio, Titian, Raphael and the famous Velazquez portrait of Pope Innocent X that Francis Bacon later turned into his screaming popes. Paintings hang in dense salon-style arrangement, the way an 18th-century aristocratic collection actually showed off. The excellent audio guide is read by the current head of the family Jonathan Doria Pamphilj, with personal memories of growing up in the palace and hiding from the Nazis in the Vatican. Rarely empty, but never as packed as the state museums.